Most shoppers who enter the seafood department of a Stew Leonard's store do a double take. It does not look like the typical supermarket seafood space; instead, it appears more like a huge fresh fish market within the store. Each of the Norwalk, Conn.-based company's four stores features as many as 50 feet of fresh fish cases that take four hours to set up daily. The stores' seafood managers handle only seafood — instead of doing double duty in also overseeing the meat department — and are longtimeemployees, as some have worked at the company for up to 25 years. The managers — and many of the seafood department staff — are true fishmongers who have been involved in the business from a young age. "The majority of our fish is bought whole, then cut in house. Each department has a minimum of three people who know how to cut fish and we have professional people running our department," says Doug Goodman, seafood manager for Stew Leonard's Yonkers, N.Y., store.
展开▼
